Skills in English: Listening Level 3 - Terry Phillips

Skills in English Listening Level 3 Course Book

The Garnet Education Skills in English series was highly commended in the Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union English Language Book Award in 2004.

Do you have to listen to lectures in English as part of your studies?

Then you need Skills in English Listening.

This course builds the skills that help you survive in the lecture room.

At Level 3, you learn how to:

• recognise fixed phrases in the stream of speech;
• use abbreviations and symbols in note-taking;
• take notes of stories, ideas, etc;
• leave space in notes for missing information;
• recognise digressions;
• understand signpost language;
• recognise rhetorical questions;
• distinguish fact from opinion;
• understand a speaker's argument;
• guess the spelling of proper nouns;
• understand dramatic language.

As well as preparing students for entry into English-medium study, the Skills in English Course is ideal for students who wish to improve their scores in skills-based examinations for university entry requirements, such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). Rather than focusing on exam preparation, Skills in English teaches the necessary skills as part of a systematic programme of language development.

Skills in English courses are also available in Speaking, Reading and Writing. See the Skills in English website at skillsinenglish.com for additional materials and help.

Key Features

• Reading texts a maximum of 700 words
• Listening texts a maximum of 1,000 words
• Speaking tasks between five and ten paragraphs, with short essay-type writing assignments
• Test booklets containing theme tests, a revision test after five units, plus an end-of-course test
• Over five hours of audio material
• Teacher's Book containing full answer keys, methodology notes and transcript of listening material
• All lectures available on DVD

Accompanying Teacher's Book, audio, Student Test Pack and Teacher Test Booklet also available.

Terry Phillips has worked in ELT for more than 35 years as a teacher, teaching supervisor, manager and language school owner. As a consultant, he has worked in more than 20 countries in all parts of the world, advising state and private language institutions on all aspects of school management.

For the last ten years, he has been a full time freelance writer with his wife Anna, producing more than 160 published books in ELT. Although he and Anna have worked for all the major publishers, all recent works have been for Garnet Education, including the multi-level EAP course, Skills in English. The course was highly commended in The Duke of Edinburgh’s English Speaking Union Award for 2004. It is taught in a large number of universities in the UK and around the world. Terry and Anna are currently working on New Skills in English, a fully revised and updated version of the course.

Terry is also the series editor of the new English for Specific Academic Purposes series for Garnet Education, which aims to prepare students to entry into a particular faculty for English-medium tertiary education. The series recently won the ESU award.

"This is a listening skills course for students in tertiary education that aims to build up students' vocabulary and listening ability so that they can cope with lectures in English. The materials consist of a Course Book, Teacher's Book, CDs (or Cassettes) and a Test Pack, all available separately. Each level in the Skills in English series is organized into ten themes, ranging from education through science and nature to business, psychology and health. This common thematic organization allows for simultaneous use of, say, writing and listening skills materials, even if the materials are on different levels. The thematic units in the listening series are divided into four parts, each with a different skills focus: (1) core vocabulary, (2) listening practice, (3) new listening skills and (4) applying new skills. Thus there is a principled build-up of knowledge and ability with appropriate practice. The topics chosen are attractive. For example, in the unit on economics, business, students listen to parts of a lecture recounting findings in motivation and needs research. Or in the unit on health, they hear a talk on food safety. The accompanying activities are well planned, and the listening mini-skills chosen for practice are useful ones. Unlike most course materials, the Teacher's Book for Skills in English: Listening is longer than the Course Book. That is because it advises teachers on the set-up of each activity as well as providing an answer key, methodological and cultural notes and tapescripts. The CEF level of Skills in English: Listening is not C1, as indicated on the cover, but something more like B1/B2 (upper-intermediate), which is what the publisher's catalogue suggests. The chief reason for this classification is the audio material, which is mostly in the form of lectures. Lecturing is clearly the most important genre for an academic listening course. However, the lectures in these materials are not authentic, being merely high-quality recordings of actors or teachers with a variety of British accents reading lecture scripts slowly and clearly. Consequently, there are no false starts, no half-finished sentences, no 10-clause utterances, no changes of pace, which are all characteristics of real lectures that sometimes make them difficult to understand. I cannot therefore imagine that Swiss university students, who are generally beyond level B2, would find the listening activities challenging. Overall, this is a well-conceived academic listening package that provides a great many listening opportunities for students and substantial didactic support for teachers. Considering its wide range of interesting topics, it might prove popular in academic-track upper secondary schools, where students are preparing for university life. Swiss university students, on the other hand, need practice in coping with the 'messier' aspects of speech in impromptu lectures."